Tag: Ayn Rand

The Next Big Thing: Cheering on Richard Branson and his wonderful company Virgin Galactic

Putting politics aside which is hard to do because ultimately everything is political, but considering our modern conditions, those definitions are changing by the moment. I am and have always been a very excited person for everything new little thing that comes along as I am very much in love with the things that humans imagine. Nature is nice too, but I really like what humans do with the tools provided by nature and to see how civilization can advance. While many look at cell phones and the hyper communications that come with them as dangerous to the old order of doing things I think it’s all part of our natural evolution as a species accelerating toward some yet to be known destination. While everyone who knows me understands how much I love tradition particularly the American western mythologies and concepts, I am very much an achievement driven person excited for tomorrow in so many ways. And that is why despite his politics, I have been very much a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors. And according to him from the interview shown below, he still plans to get his space airline into space before Christmas of this year, which would be a great feat. I am very much hopeful that he will be successful.

It’s been coming along for a while now, but if it is considered the sheer amount of information that is coming at us so fast and furious these days as opposed to when man landed on the moon in 1969 the human race is scratching at a huge change in thought and processing. As I was catching up on what Virgin Galactic was up to and if they were going to meet their timeline one of the lead stories on the Microsoft News dashboard was the newly recorded sounds of Mars as captured by the recent rover that just landed there. Much of this past week due to the very good series on the National Geographic Channel about colonizing Mars radio broadcasts across the country were contemplating what the steps to such an act would look like and what we’d all do once we got there. Elon Musk has after all been turning up the heat for his own departure from earth to live on the ancient red planet. I see many of his antics such as the smoking pot incident on a recent podcast as his teenage moment of creating enough escape velocity for himself to make the journey. He is sabotaging his own relationship with the earth so that he can psychologically make that journey to be the first to live on Mars. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about to unleash a series of space endeavors that are quite ambitious with his Blue Origin company. Between all these adventurous billionaires fueled by childhood loves of movies like Star Wars and Star Trek compounded by a strong deregulatory economy by the Trump administration—the primer is set for some very exciting technological breakthroughs on the frontier of space.

As I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games on my PlayStation 4 and started messing around with the online play with many thousands of other players all over the world simultaneously, I couldn’t help but think of how subconsciously as a human species this visit to the western genre was necessary for our current age to accept what was about to happen. It’s not the safety of the herd that the human race is after, it’s the rough existence away from the support of civilization for which adventure promises great rewards and many opportunities for death. This next generation needs to be someone reckless and masochistic in order to endure the rigors of a dynamic shift in human consciousness, leaving the comfort of our earth and scratching at the unlimited barriers of space travel. Presently we call space anything over 62 miles, or anybody who travels over 50 miles and astronaut. We think of the moon as a long way away, and Mars prohibitively distant. But all those definitions are about to change just as they did in the period of American westward expansion once electricity and phone communications shrunk the world with power. The main observation I had about that great video game was that human beings needed to revisit that last period of adventure and see what it looked like so that they could take this next big journey.

I don’t really like the term “collective consciousness” because it assumes that we are all functioning out of one great well of wisdom which is not what I think is going on. Rather, there are certain rational decisions that are common to reality so it is bound to be a mathematical probability that all humans will come to similar conclusions just by the mandate of deductive reasoning. And that is why texting is more interesting than talking to an actual person for most people, the human mind to seek out the rapid communication forms that come from something like a modern smart phone as opposed to a very static conversation with one single human being is needed for the world of tomorrow, where information must be process quickly as our knowledge base explodes from what was previously understood. Young people especially will have to think much faster than humans do today and be shocked by much fewer discovers than previous generations just to keep up with all the news stories that will began to demand our attention as the frontiers of space are unzipped.

Aerospace is one of my favorite industries due to its exploratory nature. I desire to be a part of it as much as possible and to be quite honest, I love every day of my life because I am. I love to help build the vehicles that take humans to the frontiers of our imagination and I have had a front row seat to many of these new developments. So out of a love of adventure which transcends politics, I am happily cheering on the events of these coming days. Richard Branson has worked hard with his team to get into space first and if he doesn’t make it soon, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will overtake Virgin Galactic. So he doesn’t have all the time in the world, competition and capitalism demand results and the pressure is certainly on. If Branson can get into space by Christmas of 2018 it would be a life changing moment for many people around the world. But if Christmas comes and goes and Virgin Galactic is still mired in testing, then Blue Origin or SpaceX will get there first. This new space race isn’t between nations and governments, it between billionaires and capitalist mandates and that is redefining everything rapidly.

Humans are such conceptual creatures and once we get an idea in our heads reality has a way of growing around it. And from what I see that growth will spawn entirely new industries and lifestyles. There is great reason to be optimistic. Once space tourism is unleashed, likely by Virgin Galactic first, our conceptual knowledge will expand at such a pace that the world has never witnessed. We have been preparing ourselves for this age for years with the rapid digestion of so much information. It’s not by accident or greed, it’s all by necessity. As I’ve said many times my goal in a very busy life is to read at least one book a week, but I am even feeling the pressure to read not just one, but five. So grudgingly I have turned to audio books for some of them because by necessity I need the information coming at me faster than I could possibly read everything and still do everything else needed in an 18-hour work day which is pretty typical. We are all going through a similar transition and that’s what it takes to live and grow in an expanding economy driven by human adventure and curiosity. And much of that next phase starts when Richard Branson gets his Virgin Galactic space tourism over that 50-mile line where humans become technically astronauts.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Wagner Murders: Being dumb is just as dangerous as any weapon

Let’s get something straight, judging people is good. It’s really good. The current world may say judge not and ye not be judged and I say to that, bull shit. I make my living being very judgmental and I will never starve, nor will my family because of it. Judgement is what makes us as human beings different from say a………………………………rock. So before anybody says to me, “how dare you judge people so negatively” I will say to them, shut the hell up and go get a basic education, then lets talk. Passing judgment is the way humans navigate through their existence and if you don’t do it, you might as well cut off your arms and legs because judgment is just as important to anyone and everyone. And with that in mind I watched the arraignment of the various Wagner family members intensely as they were charged with the execution style murders of eight Rhoden family members. Each of them had their own court appearance, Billy Wagner being the last, all 6’ 6” of him at 274 pounds and covered in tattoos. His wife Angela and their sons Jake and George leading up to the climax as the public saw them really for the first time. It was quite an event to look at people who could even consider murdering people in such a violent way, and all over a child custody battle. But it wasn’t just them who were part of the exhibition, it was the family who had gathered in the audience which told more of the story, one that is worth noting for posterity.

What I saw in the various arraignments was a family who liked each other and were sad that they would likely never see each other again. Their lives were ruined and essentially over and particularly in Angela, the wife, that reality had hit her hard. They looking like a nice family that probably enjoyed being around other members of their family and had hopes and dreams that lasted until that crushing moment that they decided to go kill the family that had disputed them in a custody battle over a child that was shared between them. Literature is filled with the rage of passion that comes from such emotions—Romeo and Juliet come to mind. It’s not like history doesn’t have something to say on these matters and the purpose of education is so that we learn from history, even from the fiction that authors come up with to deal with raw emotions that sometimes do erupt under tenuous circumstances.

As I watched the body language of each of them, especially Billy I couldn’t help but think that it was stupidity that had brought them all to that moment and it was such a tragedy. Being stupid in modern America is a choice and in rural Ohio a long way to the east of Cincinnati there isn’t much of a daily need for books and such. Billy likely made his way through life using his size as leverage in negotiating with other people intimidating them into compliance, so he didn’t have to put much thought into things. As he got older, he tattooed himself up because it looked scary and gave him even more capital when he needed to frighten people into doing what he said. So he didn’t have much experience in problem solving—most things in life he could solve in eastern Ohio by looking scary. That was until one of his boys impregnated the daughter of the Rhoden family that was deep into illegal activity. Between their chop shop on the family compound, their illegal cock-fighting games, and their marijuana growing operation, the Rhodens were a ruling family in that part of the world and their capital assets were their access to power. The police obviously knew what was going on and was probably involved to some extent. So when the Wagners decided that they couldn’t rely on the courts to help them with their custody case they resorted to the only means of communication they understood, brute strength and intimidation. After all, a big guy like Billy didn’t want to hear his ol’ lady bitch about some chick that his son had screwed for the rest of his life and the granddaughter that they had limited access to because the Rhodens were politically much more powerful. So he rationalized that he just kill them all so he wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore.

I’m sure the situation I described isn’t far from reality based on what we have learned so far in the case. Many families could tell the same story, they just usually don’t end up killing a rival family. As we are considering this case here on these pages, many families are thinking of Christmas and there are a lot of women getting themselves worked up over some girl their boys are dating, or some affair that someone had with someone else that is tainting the Holiday experience, or some in-law that they don’t like. Unfortunately, the Holidays for most people are filled with people they don’t like, but are nice to out of the necessity for civility. But in the car ride home the bitching never stops and it goes on incessantly and if you are a big boy like Billy who had up to that point in his life solved most problems with brute force, there really isn’t a good way to shut up the voices of dissent that come from family interactions with people who don’t share your immediate values. A big, dumb man covered in tattoos, limited reading ability and a terrible education to reference anything against is pretty defenseless in a world that requires intellect and thoughtful consideration and the sad thing about the Wagner situation is that they were all just too dumb to solve their problems with the Rhodens any other way.

As brutal as the Wagner massacre of the Rhoden family was, there is a very Christian like morality layered under it all that naturally comes from life in the Bible belt, a morality on the benefits of young children who were spared in the killings. But to any intelligent observation from the outside world, it’s not the custody of the child that was the problem. It was their level of intellectual ability that would surely destroy any child spawned from such dumb people. Being dumb is a choice, it’s not the same as being intellectually handicapped because of some birth defect. It’s a choice not to learn to read and write properly and not to use history as a guide on how to maneuver through the future. To just solve a problem the way that Shakespeare wrote about over 400 years ago is dumb because it is ignoring 500 years of human evolution in rational discourse. And if the truth were told, that is the cause of these terrible murders—sheer dumbness, purposeful lack of intellect displayed upon the upbringing of a defenseless child. Because even if the murders didn’t occur the poor kid would grow up to be just as dumb as its parents, bitching about the same dumb problems every Holiday about the same dumb people they ran into in town. And the kid would over eat and become fat like the rest of them because they were too dumb to correct the behavioral characteristics of destructive living because their brains were all underdeveloped and trying to look at the world through a pinhole that their tiny little brains had barely managed to poke through a cardboard box. And when a conflict came to pass, they solved it with the same brand of rationality. And lots of people died for no reason at all and a family that could have lived a fairly decent life given their circumstances of intellect are now going to die in prison and never see each other again—which is pretty damn stupid.

Rich Hoffman

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The Funeral of George H. W. Bush: It was a lot like the movie Soylent Green

The funeral of Bush 41 I thought was nice. I always liked George Bush the senior, and the younger, 43 as he is often termed—as people. But I do not think they were very good presidents, at least in the way I would expect out of a Republican in the White House. But I didn’t dislike them, although I remember very well how much the media did. So I shared with many the observations that the media was all too friendly toward George Bush in his death, very much contrary to what they had been during his life. That of course provoked the question as to why. As odd as it was to see the Trumps sitting with the Obamas and the Clintons and to even have Jimmy Carter there as well it was also institutionally satisfying, and it was good that President Trump attended and said nice things along the way. But the invisible strings of conformity that stirred about the entire event reminded me an awful lot of the old movie Soylent Green. Through life the people are harvested as commodities of the state, but upon their death they were ushered into the afterlife with warm music and revelry before being eaten by society itself.

The aspects of the Bush funeral which I fundamentally disagree with, and which the press and seemingly everyone celebrated was that the former president was a sacrificial person who gave his life to service for others, and now that he was no longer a threat to the order of things as a Republican, it was OK to honor him. All the attributes that were celebrated mostly are concepts that are anti-individual and pro collectivist which is the subtle undertone to the entire exercise. The message to all other Republicans by the press, the not so subtle part of their message was that if you want to be liked by the media, then the attributes of George Bush that involved self-sacrifice, service and humility are the way to get there. While those traits are largely Christian tenants of value, that doesn’t mean that the old foe of Marxism isn’t present. To understand that idea you have to understand European history and the role that the Catholic Church played on controlling so many people’s lives, in a very negative way. Then you’d have to know that Karl Marx desired to exploit that inbreed trait into the targets of his philosophy work so much inspired by Immanuel Kant. To focus thoughts on others is the way to eternal redemption. To focus on yourself is the way of the evil vices of capitalism!

George Bush was a rich man who inherited a lot of money from his father and sought to dispel the guilt that a Marxist leaning society injected upon him with service in the military, then in government for much of his life. He wanted very much to be a good man and he was, unfortunately the way that good was defined for him meant that he needed to be a collectivist. So his great wealth created a paradox for him and his extended family that was deliberately hard to negotiate. The minefield however was set up by the institutional culture for which the media represents. Their value system is subservience to the needs of the machine, sacrifice and honor as determined by the amount of sacrifice an individual makes toward the institutions they occupy.

This institutional element has become much more pronounced now in the age of Trump because so many of them are coming unraveled, and it is the source of the hatred of the current President. The odd exchange of the Trumps sitting down next to law breakers and social reformers hell-bent on taking society toward infinite collectivism was a clash of ideas that were unavoidable, yet they were brought together out of respect for a presidency that is the lead seat of American institutionalism looked at in entirely different ways. The paradox was revealed in the life of George Bush as his son George W. Bush conducted the eulogy of his father’s life and what a great job he did. While summarizing the merits of such a sacrificial being he managed to paint a picture of quite an interesting character who still sky dived late in his life and loved to watch cop dramas on television. For me I found those aspects appealing. To the institutionalists it was the sacrifice. But everyone was generally brought together by some notion of a recently deceased American president.

The media in this case are the institutional representatives that look at the life of all conservatives as bacteria in the body of collective experience. But anybody familiar with biology knows that bacteria is a useful element, its villainy is purely relative. The media hated the Bush family because they were Republicans but as the country grew away from that kind of conservative thought, the public has grown tired of the media. It was an odd thing to hear Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple lecture the world that any form of hate had no place on their platforms. As much as I love Apple products—and I do, and I know Rush Limbaugh does as well, clearly Tim Cook would view my support of the Second Amendment and liberal activism as hate speech and is suggesting that I’m not welcome to the company. But it’s not lost on me that most people who call themselves liberals, especially the creative types, use Apple as their primary functionary to interact with cyberspace. And most of them participate in hate speech. I have no doubt that if a survey of ANTIFA members were taken as to what phone system they used most it would be Apple if they could actually afford the product. Is Apple as a company talking to them?

The harassment of the Bush family by the media over all the years created Donald Trump. George W. Bush and his dad and brother took a terrible beating needlessly by just the same kind of people who tend to buy Apple products, the Hollywood left, the media culture, the hipsters and saggy assed getto thugs, the drug mules who cross the border then claim that America owes them something as illegal immigrants. It was their collective ooze for which the media pronounced was civil conduct and once George Bush the senior was laid to rest, it was OK to pay respect to him in that sacrificed state, as an essence of life to be consumed by the masses, a throw back to the days before there was a Donald Trump in the White House, rather than the man who loved his wife dearly and was a damn good father to his kids. There is a lot very evil about the process, the way that all the good things about George H. W. Bush were punished and all the bad things about him adored. It was quite an interesting paradox which comes from a society that has a schizophrenic relationship with itself. It was very clear to me, that the institutions of our modern life values death and consumption far more than productivity and effort. And that is the hard lesson that was very much on full display at the funeral of the 41st President of the United States.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s All About Gas Prices: Who cares about Khashoggi, for $20 I was able to fill up my whole tank

You have to understand what’s going on when you hear that all these United States Senators and the like are suddenly upset about the CIA report saying the crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the execution of a Washington Post reporter in Istanbul. The righteous indignation is not over the death of a political activist reformer using his position as a reporter to incite challenges to Saudi Arabian rule, it is to make the gasoline lobby in Washington happy because they are very unhappy that President Trump has made America independent again at the gas pump and that has driven fuel prices under $2 per gallon where I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. This happening just as the Holiday season is in full gear giving American consumers millions and millions of extra dollars to spend on a fourth quarter spike to the 2018 economy. Those who profit from a less than great American economy are pretty pissed off, which all who are reading here should be very happy about.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the gas prices. I stopped by my usual place to get gas early in the morning before most people were up and decided to put $20 into the tank. Usually that gives me about a half tank that I use most of the rest of the week. When the pre-pay was complete, I put the gas nozzle back into its holster and jumped into the driver’s seat to go about my business. Out of habit I looked at the gas gauge just to make sure that it was reading the fuel that had just been applied to my vehicle’s tank and was surprised to see it was nearly full. That prompted me to look at the sign out by the main road at what the gas prices were and sure enough it said the price per gallon was $1.99. I thought that was simply astonishing given the world conditions. After all, that was precisely why Parisians were rioting in the streets that weekend, was due to excessively high gas prices due to too many environmental constraints.

President Trump had a plan and that was to make the American economy the strongest it has ever been, so one of the first things he did once sworn in was to make more supply of gas so that Saudi Arabia couldn’t dictate the supply exclusively essentially charging anything they wanted for a barrel of oil. Politics had created an artificial constraint to leverage favor toward the oil and gas lobby and that meant very favorable margins for them at the expense of the consumer. Trump took that away from that lobby and put the money back in the pockets of the consumer with competitive supply making America the largest oil-producing nation in just a few short years of his first term in office. A miraculous feat in and of itself. Of course, you won’t read about this miracle in the press and within the media culture because most of them still rely heavily on oil and gas money in advertising, and they certainly don’t want the public to know how fragile their existence truly was or how they have been price gouging people at the pumps for well over 50 years.

Of course, part of that equation was to keep Saudi Arabia as a supplier, because that competition leverages even American producers to keep their prices per barrel of oil down. So in a free market system that needs as many competitors as possible to get prices to a real market value, “what customers are willing to pay for gas” Trump leveraged the American fuel market to bring down the costs in Saudi Arabia and that effect has been a downward trend in gas prices since 2016, when Trump took office officially. Then of course the Crowned Prince appears to have killed off a rival in the press for which the world, particularly those in the media, wanted punishment for. But Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country. If he wants to kill people, that’s his business, right?

The way liberals work is they use peer pressure to leverage sentiment. In this case they wanted to trick Trump into going against Saudi Arabia which would really make the gas lobby happy, and it would give liberals what they want as well, a damaged president with a weak economy going into the 2020 election which would make him easier for them to beat. By excreting peer pressure on Trump they “the media run by the oil and gas lobby through advertising” could force him into a corner for which he could never get out of. But, Trump fortunately is a business guy and he isn’t so prone to emotional sentiment because he knows how the game is played, so he did the unexpected, he used his friendship with Saudi Arabia to leverage them to further reduce oil prices which is why gas prices are trending downward dramatically right in the meat of the Holiday season in America. This has pumped a lot of expendable income that would otherwise just go to oil companies in artificially inflated margins and put those dollars to use in the American economy. How about that—who would have figured?

People die all the time. For instance, a lot of people have died near the Clintons all through the years over lots of different types of issues. Benghazi comes to mind. Seth Rich does too. What if The New York Times and other newspapers put as much effort into discovering the conditions of murder of that Democrat operative who supposedly was leaking documents from the DNC directly to Wikileaks had an investigation done to the extent that they perform one for the murdered Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi? Both were high-profile murders, but one directly involved Democrats and pointed to a smoking gun that was very embarrassing to them. The other took away the leverage President Trump had created with Saudi Arabia through friendship to keep gas prices down in the fourth and first quarter of a new year during the 2018 Holiday season. The media being against the Trump agenda almost violently is picking their stories to fit an agenda, one that makes their advertisers happy ultimately.

Of those paid participants in this grand conspiracy are senators like Bob Corker, the forever Never Trumper who wears a Republican title next to his name, but might as well be a Democrat operative in all reality. Corker and those like him in the senate who really hate everything about Trump because the president is independent of the usual Washington controls would love to see the American economy tank if it got rid of President Trump. They wouldn’t care if gas prices were $4 per gallon, which they were under previous administrations for which Bob Corker was still a senator because the gas lobby was happy and that money flowed back into the pockets of senators through indirect means, and the Washington establishment was very happy about it. I’m only picking on Bob Corker because he has put himself at the front of the Anti-Trump Saudi conspiracy. There are reasons for his Anti-Trumper behavior and you’d understand if you know anything about the guy. He is a compromised person, years ago he made a lot of his previous money in real estate, a lot of which went bad. As of 2008 he had a net worth of around $19 million and just ten years later its at $40 to $50 million on a job that only pays $174,000 per year. Math doesn’t lie even though senators often do, Republicans and Democrats.

Part Two: The Corruption of Bob Corker

I say all this because you have to know the game that is being played, not the one that the media is showing. The hatred of Trump isn’t because of the death of a Washington Post reporter, it’s because the economy is too good, and that Saudi Arabia has lost their leverage. By looking the other way on the Khashoggi death Saudi Arabia has to be very thankful to Trump, and gas prices are showing it, and will get even better as we get into the 2019 vacation months. After all, the Seth Rich death was overlooked, so why not Khashoggi? I mean if all deaths are equal, everyone should care about them no matter who they are. But the Khashoggi death is only out of a need to control the optics so that the gas lobby can attempt to regain control of the world market. But Trump didn’t fall for it and I’m happy because for $20, I was able to fill up my whole tank at the gas pump. And that is what really matters.

Rich Hoffman

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I Still Believe in Santa Claus: Why the magic of childhood is more important than the dissapointments of reality

It seems to be happening all across the country, particularly among substitute teachers but one at the Cedar Hill School in Montville, New Jersey was particularly disturbing since it was targeting 5 to 6-year-old kids, and that is the trend of telling them that there is no Santa and therefore, no hope in the world for them to look forward to. I haven’t yet read or heard any commentary on this topic that really dug into the root of the issue as it is so horrendous that normal people just can’t get their mind around why an adult of any kind would do such a thing. To understand the big picture of what is going on we have to understand why we have the mythologies of Santa and Easter Bunnies, and Tooth Fairies to begin with. We also must understand why teachers in public schools are against children’s expansion of knowledge for which all imaginative endeavors are designed to evoke. The quest to destroy Santa in the lives of young children is the progressive fulfillment of a much larger desire, the destruction of individual needs and the shared experience of collective endeavor. The notion of a Santa Claus fulfilling the wishes of individual children is a repulsive idea to most progressives, so they use the beat down over caffeinated employees of public education to do their bidding.

My oldest daughter and I had an interesting debate on Santa Claus a few years ago as she was inclined to think that she didn’t want her child to accept falsehoods of hope and become dependent on a jolly old man dressed in red to bring him presents for being a good little boy, “good” being defined by parameters she may or may not agree with. Such as if good meant complete compliance to the state then she couldn’t support such a thing, but if good meant acting in accordance with his individual integrity, then perhaps so. Due to the lack of understanding of what “good” meant at Christmas time, then she was inclined to pass on the mythic experience all together. But my thing to her was that all kids as they built conceptual knowledge in their brains needed mythic elements to elevate their consciousness. So the basic foundations of goodness and hope for which the Christmas season is so emphatic were healthy for a growing mind until they could afford to function on their own. After all, a child has no means of interacting with the world and their conceptual knowledge is lacking due to their limited experiences in life, so we create stories to help them arrive at those important foundations as their brains develop.

That is after all why we do the things we do for children. When they are young their minds are hopeful and filled with boundless optimism, and that is needed because they must overcome so many things just to arrive at 5 to 6 years old. They have to learn to walk, talk, read, interact with lots of other people, and they do so with optimism because that is the foundation needed for learning. If a child fell on their first opportunity to walk and just stayed flat on their face waiting for someone to pick them up, they’d be ruined for life and would never learn anything. They must have that desire to keep getting up and trying things over and over again until they succeed. That is the basis of all learning. Parents who rush to pick their children up after every little boo boo are actually destroying their minds. They mean well, but the point of growing up is to gain experience and if experience is denied then great harm comes to the children effected. It is good to let kids fall and get cut. It is good for them to run in the rain and get a little sick, so that their immune systems develop into a healthy defense of their bodies as they get older. It is good for children to stumble and fall because they will have a great wealth of knowledge to live as productive adults later on. Sometimes being a great parent is to let kids get cut up and battered a bit when they are kids so they know how to avoid much more dangerous things when they are older. The world today is filled with neurotic adults who were too coddled as children who cry at every little smashed insect and hurt feeling.

And that is why we give kids the magic of a positive and fulfilling childhood so that when they do become adults they can have as many tools to work with intellectually as possible and they can then in turn give good childhoods to their children. I would say that the quality of a childhood largely determines the quality of the adult. If a kid has a bad childhood, they will become damaged adults, so the mythologies of childhood are infinitely important to the furtherance of the human race. As adults its our jobs to provide as much knowledge and optimism as possible because at a certain point in their lives they stop being kids and become adults. The destructive teenage years are certainly that shattering of reality where life becomes disillusioning. But the process of life often is, so as humans we have mitigated that disappointment by providing children with wonderful ideas so that once they become adults they have good memories to endure them through the many disappointments. That’s not to say that children should always stay that way, at a young age their brains are not yet ready for the rigors of adult life, so we create intellectual tools to assist them during this critical period of their lives until mature brain development occurs and a human being is ready for the world. In that context Santa Claus is a wonderful conceptual invention of mythology and culture and it teaches young people the best about what life has to offer.

Of course, if you want to destroy a person the best way to do it is by removing their conceptual aptitude, take away their hopes and dreams so that they resort to the basic function of a non-thinking animal. And this is just what progressive types are looking for in creating compliant people for tomorrow’s authoritarian regimes of political masters, a voting population that will keep them in power because they are stupid, and hopeless. And without question that substitute teacher had at some point in their life had their hopes removed and was frustrated with the enthusiasm of youth because guilt was likely the emotion they had about their own lives and how poorly they’ve managed it. That hatred of the pure and innocent comes usually from people who have had all hope removed from their own lives and it is the ultimate act of selfishness to rob children of their own opportunities by adults who have obviously given up. It’s simply not fair to the children to have adults attempt to take from them hopes and dreams of a bigger and better world. Even though such an idea is a conceptual fantasy ultimately kids grow up to become what they thought about most. And thinking about Santa Claus at that magical time of innocence is one of the best things adults can do for helpless children still growing intellectually. And it is terribly evil for anybody to seek to rob kids of that opportunity. Especially those employed by the state as public-school teachers who put progressive objectives ahead of intellectual development. It is for all those reasons that I still believe in Santa, and likely always will!

Rich Hoffman

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The Greatest Weapon in the World: To always endeavor to be the smartest person in the room

There is a certain mentality that you must have if you want to be able to stand up to bullies like the current F.B.I. and all the power they have, or if in general you want to be a leader of people in whatever capacity. You, as a person must endeavor to be the smartest person in the room. If you are, no tyrannical bully can ever gain the leverage of fear against you and make silly threats for which you can never deal with. This is essentially why Donald Trump is so successful in whatever he does. Being the smartest person in the room in my experience doesn’t come from genetic inheritance as much as it comes from hard work. If you put in the time to become intelligent, you will have leveraged yourself into the most fundamental position any leader needs to be in. If you are the smartest person in the room, especially in America, you will ultimately become the decision maker for a lot of people because people will naturally follow you. So in that context you never have to fear the power of a corrupt law enforcement officer or a ruthless dictator, because intelligence most of the time all by itself is enough to wipe them out.

A lot of people assume that I’m the kind of person who would start shooting up bad guys at the first sign of trouble. But honestly, I have done a lot more damage to villainous people with my mind. When things do get bad, which doesn’t happen much, but over the years happens from time to time, I seldom have to use violence to make my point. Sometimes it evolves into that because the people you are dealing with are not very smart so they have no other weapons to work with but violence. However most of the time, just being the smartest person in the room is enough to diffuse anything and advance any topic.

From personal experience I have dealt with a lot of different people, some who would claim to be the richest and most powerful in all of Cincinnati financially. Others politically. My kids and I were talking the other day about how different Over-the-Rhine was today in downtown Cincinnati than it was almost thirty years ago when I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati for a while and accepted a dare to walk from Central Parkway up to Bogarts by way of Vine Street, which at that time was ripe with many, many criminal elements. I did so and not a single person bothered me. A lot of people looked at me very intensely, but not a single person engaged with me the way people might think would happen by way or robbery, or some other physical assault. I felt I could deal with any problem that anybody might throw at me and it showed in my personality which nobody wanted anything to do with. It wasn’t that I was a big guy, or that I was heavily armed. In fact, I didn’t have any weapons on me during that walk. All I had was what I knew. On a separate occasion a few years earlier, I was on a date in downtown Cincinnati where I am sure the intention was a robbery. I was taking my wife to a downtown restaurant but we parked near the courthouse because I felt that was a place where vandalism might be the least but on our way a large group of very scary looking inner city dwellers covered in gold chains and all the stereotypes of a rap video blocked our passage. After a quick qualifying conversation with a very large leader of the group, easily over 6’5” he decided that we weren’t worth the trouble. He asked me for our money, I told him we didn’t have any. He said to me that you don’t have a girl like “dat” without “no” kind of money.” My response was to ask him why not. That was probably the last thing he was prepared to hear. Most people obviously just gave him the money and went about their way. The fear of being hurt by him was enough. But when I asked him why it put the burden on him to respond with his true intentions. He elected to move on with his little gang of thugs because their imaginations as to why I was confident were running wild and it wasn’t worth the risk. I could tell an even worse story about Washington D.C. when I had to go out at 2 AM in a really bad part of the city to find milk for my kids as we were staying in a hotel nearby. I got the milk but no further trouble much to the shock of the people who heard about the story later.

I have had an unusual life in that I have been to court many, many times. I’ve nearly been put in jail more times than I can count. I have personally known hit men, famous Bengal players who were major drug dealers after their playing days were over. I used to repo cars for a living and have been shot at several times but I never was consumed by that lifestyle. I always lived outside of its grip. One time when all my friends were in jail on the campus of Miami University because we got into a huge fight with the football team at a bar there I was the only one not put in jail and I managed to talk reason to the officers to get a quick release of my friends, not that they deserved it over a weekend so they didn’t have to wait for an arraignment on the following Monday. On several occasions I’ve defended myself successfully in court as my own attorney because why hire someone not as smart as you to deal with something you have a stake in. And in saying all this I’m not saying that biologically I was ever the smartest, I have been friends with people with IQs near 200, I’m thinking of at least 2 people as I write this, which is very rare. I received my intelligence the old-fashioned way, through very hard work. I started reading as a young person not yet ten. As a teenager I continued that trend more than my peers. Then as a young adult I really took off starting a habit of at least one book a week of all different topics. After a few years you discover that no matter who you are dealing with, being well read gives you an advantage in almost any conflict. I have always had a personality that challenged authority which is why I got into so much trouble. But the more books I read the less trouble I found myself in which was an interesting ratio. I kept doing it and have found that after thirty years of that behavior, you can do the math. Nobody can really fight you if you know more about things than they do. Even if they resort to physical encounters, all those things you learn I think are far more powerful weapons than any gun. I’m an advocate of concealed carry but honestly, I doubt I would ever use it since I feel that I can defeat any situation without coming to that scenario. It helps to always be the smartest person in the room and if you commit yourself to that, you’d be surprised how safe in the world you really are.

I say all that because these are scary times, obviously in the world of politics the old world of brute force and stupidity—which I’d term the Robert Mueller investigation—is fighting the election of Donald Trump and those of us who put him into office. All they have is fear to use to defend their control on the world. If you know better, all their primary weapons are worthless. If you are the smartest person in the room there is no jail they can put you in, no gun they can draw, or legalism they can use to put pressure on you to flip to save your beloved family members. I feel sorry in a lot of ways for people like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and even General Flynn. They were smart and powerful guys in their specific professions, but when it comes to being smart about life, they are still prone to being victimized by an F.B.I. that thinks it has intelligence leverage over them, so they can make threats and get a desired response from those witnesses because they aren’t smart enough about more topics in the world to defend themselves. But in all honesty, I can at least report that the tactics used by the F.B.I. are those of very stupid people who have no case and are no different from those street thugs I mentioned who thought about robbing me many years ago in Cincinnati. They have size, strength and weapons, but not intelligence—because intelligence takes work to nature and most people don’t do it, leaving them always at a disadvantage to those who do. If you really want to be a tough person who can stand up to anything, then read a book. And not just one, but one ever week and you will discover dear reader that will be the most powerful weapon you can ever have, and guess what—nobody in the world can take it away from you.

Rich Hoffman

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Why GM Has Failed: It’s all about restrooms

It is amazing how little people know about basic economic matters, especially in relation to the announcement that General Motors is planning to close its Lordstown plant in Ohio and laying off 15% of its salaried workforce and some production workers with a total of 14,700 jobs lost from that northern Ohio community. Even from people who are supposed to understand these complicated matters I couldn’t find many news outlets that truly understood the problem that GM is facing so I’ll sum it up very easily. It has everything to do with bathrooms. But first, lets study a very interesting Forbes article that made a lot of attempts at pinpointing the problem only to miss in every circumstance. Here are a few of the highlights with a link to the original article presented below. The link to the MSN article is even worse. It is filled with so much socialist rantings that it would be otherwise unreadable if not for the way it reflects the average opinion on the General Motors matter.

General Motors said today it is ending production next year at five of its plants including its last remaining plant in Detroit and its Lordstown plant in Ohio. The reasons: they largely make sedans, which U.S. car buyers are increasingly rejecting in favor of SUVs; and Trump-era tariffs are creating headwinds and higher costs for the automaker.

–Higher costs, due in part to the Trump administration steel tariffs, have already cost GM $1 billion, and those costs will persist and rise as long as they are in place.

Of the plants targeted for an end of production, the Lordstown plant has the best chance to possibly stay open. GM will soon kick off negotiations with the UAW, and the union will likely lobby hard for a crossover vehicle to be located at the plant located east of Toledo on the Ohio turnpike. “General Motors’ decision today… will not go unchallenged by the UAW,” said Terry Dittes, the union’s vice president in charge of negotiations with GM.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2018/11/26/gm-cuts-jobs-and-plants-to-deal-with-changing-tastes-and-trump-tariffs/#654e378e6057
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gm-layoffs-signal-its-going-to-get-worse-for-the-american-worker/ar-BBQ84Ne?ocid=spartanntp

Here is the basic problem, and I understand why Trump, Mike DeWine, Rob Portman and even the economic buffoon Sherrod Brown want to twist GM’s arm to keep the Lordstown plant open. After all, General Motors took money for a bailout and the government feels it has a right to help manage the affairs of the company. But that is more of an exasperation of the problem than a fix. General Motors is failing and continues to fail because they just don’t have good leadership and unlike the days of the Sloan Management system, do not have people in their organization that can step up and take over at the top CEO job. Everything has become politicized at General Motors and they have grown to feel they are entitled to exist rather than needing to compete in a harsh automotive maker’s market. General Motors main problem is they have weak management largely because their labor unions feel they have shared control of the company which means that the good managers that are out there want nothing to do with General Motors leaving behind a bunch of slack-jawed losers to run the company, because only a fool would want to work with a bunch of lazy, slow, and contemptuous union leaders who think they share the burden of running a company. Because of that General Motors top management have turned to politics for help and that has only made them worse. To hear their current CEO think that by directing the company’s resources toward electric cars and autonomous vehicles is the wave of the future, they have not done their value stream maps correctly. Americans don’t want vehicles that they can’t drive. They love the independence of driving themselves and they want bigger cars that use more gas. Tesla has carved out a notch for themselves, but not to the extent that a company the size of General Motors should follow. The fact that they don’t know how to think for themselves says everything.

The real problem is that the labor union has destroyed the American automaker market. The pensions are too expensive for a declining company. If auto sales from America were still dominating the global market, it wouldn’t be a problem. But when you lose market share, which all American auto companies have, there simply is not a way to pay for an expensive work force that can’t keep the company at the top of their game. The American worker has taken their jobs for granted, especially in relation to auto jobs and they are losing to much more competitive foreign markets. When you travel around the world and the only cars you see are Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas and the like, there is no way that General Motors can afford to compete with top-heavy labor costs and pension commitments that are projected to cripple them for the next 50 years. The socialist fantasy of the big labor unions running the auto companies with shared input has long been over. The government contributions have only prolonged the bleeding, the problem started when America no longer built the kind of cars the world wanted by people who really weren’t passionate about their work.

If you go right now to a typical Japanese factory, whether they are making cars, boats, copy machines, whatever you can think of and a worker on the line would want to use the restroom, they’d indicate they needed relief, a supervisor or co-worker would fill their spot while the worker would lightly jog to the restroom and back again as fast as they could safely. Urgency and passion are part of the Japanese culture in everything they do including simple transactions at fast food restaurants. When they ask to use the restroom, they get to it and return to their work promptly and without excuse as they fully invest themselves into their endeavor. Go to the typical General Motors Cruz manufacturing line and a worker needs to use the restroom, typically a person grossly overweight and dressed like they just rolled out of a trash can indicates they need to relieve themselves. Once their relief shows up to cover their spot, they don’t return for another 20 minutes. If you walk behind the fat slob you’ll find they take an extra five minutes walking to the bathroom, they spend at least 5 to 10 minutes going to the rest room playing on their phone and reading graffiti on the stall wall, then they spend at least 5 minutes walking back talking to anybody who they can manage to engage in a conversation stalling as long as possible before they get back to the imprisonment of their work detail. They don’t love their work and because of the mentality of their labor union they are always seeking to do the least amount of it because they think the vile management system is always trying to steal something from them, so they in turn are always looking to steal time from the company. Usually its obvious in their restroom habits, but if you track the employee throughout their work day you can see it everywhere in everything they do.

Management in these American companies don’t have any form of control of their operations so only the bad ones stick around. The false premise that all socialists have is that everyone is equal, the worker and the manager and that everyone through consensus determines the direction of the group is completely wrong. Nothing could be said worse—such a condition never exists anywhere. Leadership is not a collective endeavor, it’s a very lonely one. Getting buy-in to leadership decisions is a collective enterprise, but the role of management is not. The workers are not in a position to determine strategic relationships between the manufacturing process and the tactical need to implement them. It takes people good at that kind of thing and when unions take over shop management only the fools stick around. And when fools run a manufacturing facility through communist dreams of unity, people take 20 minutes to use the restroom and they build bad cars that the world doesn’t want that are too expensive. It has nothing to do with tariff wars or even changing gas prices, it’s all about bad management which GM even with lots of bail outs and help by the tax payer have shown they are lacking. The future of automobiles are not automated cars and electric-powered ones at that, it’s in independence on the open road of America’s vast expanses of land, and a foreign market that would like to pretend that they live in America. The failure of GM management to see that for themselves says everything that needs to be said about why General Motors is struggling and jobs are being lost. And no politician or any amount of money in the world can fix their lack of vision and leadership.

And if you have any doubts about what I’ve said, just watch the videos on this article.  The proof is quite obvious, especially the last one.

Rich Hoffman

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Richard Hardy’s ‘The Program Manager’: A book more about communism in the corporate world than business, but well worth the read

You have to understand, I read a lot. A whole lot. And if I could, I’d read even more. Every time we have one of these Holiday seasons and all the people I know send me texts and emails wishing me good tidings and my response back to them is usually short and to the point, it’s usually because I’m rushing back to a book. That’s not all I do of course, I live a very full life, but I think reading a lot and maintaining my rule of reading at least one book a week all weeks of the year is very important. Professionally I am a professional problem solver, and I don’t spend any time looking over my shoulder the way a lot of people do worrying about being knocked off the ladder of success because honestly the root source of my magic is my ability to read and communicate what I have learned. But to be honest, it takes a lot of work. I don’t think there is any book on this planet that can teach people to be successful if they are not willing to do a lot of hard work. I would say to anybody who fantasizes about being successful that unless you are willing to outwork the other person, you will likely always be second place in anything you do, or in a lot of cases, dead last. If you lack drive, curiosity and a quest for knowledge you will not have much of a life, and those are just cold hard facts. My habit is to look at reading as a daily exercise and I do it as much as I can, and the results always give me a competitive advantage not so much over other people, but in the circumstances of challenges that are presented to us all. I like having the answers to questions before they are even asked, so keeping a brain fed is the best way to achieve that function.

Being the Holiday season of Thanksgiving where generally there are four consecutive days off every year it is a time to catch up my ratio for the year and to stay on target, I needed to read seven more books to catch up to my 2018 targets. Some of the books I read in 2018 were big ones so it can sometimes take a week or two longer to read them, which throws off my target, which I always catch up on during the two Holidays at the end of the year. Over this particular Holiday weekend I was able to read four books, some of them 300 to 400 pages, some of them only about 150. And surprisingly it was that shorter book called The Program Manager written back in 1999 and self-published by Richard Hardy formerly of Boeing that I enjoyed the most. Usually books on business topics are boring and the fun of life is not present in them. But its important to suffer through them because always there are little nuggets of information that need polished a bit before you can use them, but are of great value nevertheless.

Much to my surprise Richard Hardy likely nearing retirement hit on a very slippery topic in his book on how to be a program manager, and that is to articulate how much communism is present in the modern world both politically and within corporate structures. It really too me by surprise, but as an older guy it is understandable. But I’m sure within Boeing there was a lot of consternation about his book coming out, even if it was self-published and a little rough on the grammar. The insights are quite good and as you’d expect from someone at the top of their particular field of endeavor. I look at those kinds of books as though you had the opportunity to meet someone and have them tell you their life story and you can extract from that whatever you want. The professionalism of the publishing profession is to put it as bluntly as Richard Haley did, filled with communists. Of course, nobody calls themselves that, and many of the publishers in New York and London think that term is rubbish. They call themselves progressives now, or “environmental activists” but that is only because they don’t know their history. For students of history, not the history they teach you in public education or in college, what is present in almost everything, especially in the corporate world, is varying degrees of communism that people have just accepted over the last 100 years. A book like Hardy’s The Program Manager would never be published professionally by a New York publisher. But sometimes it is those books that are the most valuable to read.

And while we are being blunt, most of the Lean activities that most company’s employ to attempt to mitigate that trend is to get communist thinking of group associations and power from above structures to become more holistic instead of siloed. Cuba for instance as a communist country was extremely siloed meaning they were never open to outside ideas, but only the ones flowed from the top down. Lean concepts are all about decentralizing those sentiments so that the point of emphasis is the health of the company everyone works with. Like most politicians’ power structures within an organization chart become their obsession and they constantly view their workers as middle-class citizens, or even worse, among the poor and they spend a lot of time thinking about that class structure when they should be thinking about running a business. I was curious what Richard Hardy who worked in the very stringent Boeing culture did to solve problems in that environment and was surprised to find him such an Ayn Rand fan, an individualist who understood the nature of all things. After reading his book I’m not surprised that he was so successful and sought after. But I was surprised to learn how consistent it was to my own personal thoughts on the matter.

And that is what reading can do for you, just when you think you know everything that there is to know, you find yourself surprised by something that should be obvious but isn’t. When it comes to business books, most of them are very dry and philosophically dormant. They talk about how to do something but don’t really get into why companies are siloed or how holistic thinking can be good and sustainable for continued profit growth and employee sustainability. But Richard Hardy made his point quite well protecting the names of his fellow workers at Boeing and replacing them with a metaphor of bulls protecting a herd as essentially being the primary objective of the program manager. Most of what he said in his book are things that are easily obtained in other books and college level courses, but in his case he was talking about the development of the Joint Strike Fighter well in advance of our modern times which I remember being a part of, so I had some context to his subject, then to read some of the behind the scenes decisions and the why and hows was quite a treat. It was a very nice surprise that doesn’t come along too often.

I don’t know how well the copies of it that are still out there will be. I bought one that was in good condition arrive, but as I flipped through it the pages were falling out from being dry rotted. I practically had to tape the thing together as I read it to keep the book intact. But if you can get your hands on one not so much for the task of business management, but for understanding how communism entered all our lives and tried to change the nature of American life so subtly and over such a long period of time, it is a very interesting read and well worth the time in doing it.

Rich Hoffman

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As The Wagons Circle: Trump’s real plan is revealed as Mexico is finally preparing to pay for the wall

Remember when Trump said he was going to build a wall on the southern border and Mexico was going to pay for it, well now the how is revealing itself. Now that the caravans have arrived and Tijuana is struggling to pay for all the new immigrants from Central America who were literally pushed into making the journey to the border looking for asylum American forces have been authorized to use force to prevent them from going any further, but it is Mexico who has been tasked with dealing with the issue or else—Trump is threatening to close the border. To those who haven’t been to Mexico lately that is a devastating proposition, because the entire country relies so heavily on American tourism that such a threat seriously jeopardizes the few legitimate businesses that Mexico produces, within the tourist industry. Without American tourism, and any Mexican will admit when asked, Mexico’s legitimate economy falls apart. So when Trump told Mexico to do something about the caravan, the leverage is clearly in the court of America and the beginnings of the Mexican payoff is emerging through all the political smoke.

With the Democrats coming into control of the House in January clearly the military budget is about to be reduced and the pressure to have continued open borders especially along the southern United States will increase. Drug dealers from south of the border without question are not happy that the American military is at the southern border stopping illegal crossings which have been coaxed along by these caravans of immigrants and the byproduct of that is a look at the world after Trump’s wall where drug smuggling suddenly got a lot harder. Democrats being the party of illegal activity and drug abuse are going to look keenly at resolving the immediate conflict so that the drug dealers can get back to work which all puts Trump in a commanding position with all the leverage.

The panic is full-blown as most people haven’t been paying attention to the news over the last several days, due to the American Holiday season. But Mathew Whitaker the acting Attorney General has come under serious attack by Democrats over supposed “Hatch Act” violations which occurred during a previous run for Senate. They obviously don’t want anybody but a lap dog to keep their Mueller conspiracy theory story going by a federal investigation initiated by the liberal activist James Comey. Jerome Corsi is being pushed into a plea deal to essentially root out any Wikileaks connections to the 2016 campaign, which is yet another attempt to fight many things on several fronts. There is currently a global motion to remove Wikileaks from any future campaigns and to kick Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Talk about a lack of freedom of the press. The whole effort is about complete control of the press under the ruse of “justice.” And a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation has been allowed to proceed by a Manhattan judge essentially to mire the President in legal battles on so many fronts that he won’t have any options available to him but to yield in mercy. That is the strategy. Isn’t it interesting how Democrats are so interested in justice when they have something they want done, but if the same effort is applied to them, it’s all a conspiracy theory. If the kind of evidence existed against Republicans, which it doesn’t, that occurred with the DNC, Hillary Clinton, the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former President Obama Republicans should be having sit ins and protests for justice every day. But most Republicans don’t have the will to fight all the time so Democrats get away with things, but when they think they can use the law as a weapon they never hesitate.

But there is an Achilles heel to all this excitement, the border wall. The reason that Democrats want to remove Trump from office so viciously is in what he has the power to do, which is defend the nation from enemies. That is a right the Executive Branch has that fall outside the powers of the congress. Trump can also get nominations through the senate and can still appoint a new Attorney General with his Senate majority which also falls outside of the authority of congress. So the increase in panic from Democrats is due to the control Trump has on the southern border and there isn’t anything they can do about it. The stand-off there in Tijuana is the lead story in every circumstance because it has brought a halt to illegal immigration there, since the military is on the border, and drug dealing has trickled to a fraction of what it has been costing cartels millions and millions of dollars in adjustments to ship their poison through other means to their target buyers.

There are a lot of bad people at work and it all centers around the border wall which Trump has all the high ground to enforce. So no matter what side stories emerge, Trump’s border wall, or one that is currently being covered with military forces, is the key to the whole chess game. And in that game Mexico is going to end up paying for the wall because their tourism industry is under serious jeopardy. At this point they would do anything to get tourist activity back to some semblance of normalcy. All this controversy is not good for business, especially when tourism is all that they really have.

In the past when the United States had Presidents who needed advisors just to walk down the hall, having a business guy in office who understands the power of money and leverage has made a tremendous difference. Even with all the weapons that Democrats are throwing at Trump legally, the President has all the cards that matter, financial leverage on all fronts, and he knows how to play those cards and when. When Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won the election to be the next Mexican president Trump was nice to him even though the politician was an extreme leftist. Trump didn’t care, he reached out a hand with offers to make future deals anyway, just as he has done with Nancy Pelosi in the congress. That is another benefit of having a business guy in the White House. A typical politician wouldn’t know what to do or how to wear the many different masks that are required to deal with such people. But also, as any business person understands, what you show isn’t always what you play, and now that the friendly relationship between Trump and Obrador has been in place, the burden to stop those caravans resides on Mexico, not America. Otherwise Trump can really hurt Mexico where they are most vulnerable—tourism.

It only took a few years to get to this point, but in the world of strategy, everything is happening right on time, and in spite of all the dirty tricks the Democrats are throwing at the situation. The open borders people are not happy, the poison they want to destroy America with is having major gaps in delivery. The future Democrat voters that they always hope to extract out of the immigrant community are stuck in Tijuana. Even the mayor of Tijuana is a kind of Trump supporter who is trying to bring the kind of populism seen in North America to that city of sin and intrigue, which is a new development on the world stage and all this is happening as we speak. As the wagons of court proceedings circle around Trump and his associates thinking that they have him trapped in a circular firing squad, Trump’s ultimate objective is at the border wall where nobody can touch him. And that will lead to a very exciting start to the new year!

Rich Hoffman

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Thankfully No Jokesters at the White House Correspondence Dinner in 2019: Respect and Leadership do not owe comedy “equality”

Honestly, I think the pick to put Ron Chernow as the headliner of this year’s White House Correspondence Dinner is a good one. His book on Grant was fabulous as he is a great historian and to me that should be the purpose of the dinner. This tradition of laughing at ourselves as a country is a pretty dumb one. How it got started in the first place is something that we should have revisited a long time ago. I understand the need for comedy, but there is psychologically something much more sinister going on at roasts of celebrities and people who have achieved great importance, and when it comes to President Trump, he has one clear message for his years as the leader of the Executive Branch, respect is a theme he has always wished to cultivate on projects he works on. This trend to make fun of everything so not to show that we as a culture and as a people don’t take ourselves too seriously has major flaws that should have ended after Johnny Carson and Bob Hope’s era closed. After them, the trend went out of control and has turned into a joke and that doesn’t help America be great, which for many in the typical White House Correspondence Dinner audience always wanted anyway.

I share with Trump a distaste for personal aggrandizement. I just never have participated in it and I don’t do it to other people. Part of the gift of thinking positive about everything is that it has to start with yourself and if you are making fun of some imperfection that you have to show the world that you aren’t any better than they are, well then you are a captor to their limitations for themselves. When you work hard to be the best person that you can be, why on earth would you sit around and let people find flaws in what you have done? Especially when the people making fun of you haven’t made any efforts themselves at greatness.

We all have grown up with this notion that its good not to take yourself very serious and it was always a false one. After all, if you don’t take yourself seriously, who else will, and in many cases—especially when it comes to children we raise, people we lead in industry or just friends and neighbors, they need someone to believe in. So if we allow our value to be cheapened by silly jokes about ourselves and allow our image to be brought down to earth where all the lazy and unambitious are sitting around as losers smoking pot, drinking too much and generally showing no yearning to live life to the fullest, then we have cheapened everything we individually stand for, and that has always been the point.

When people who do great things allow themselves to be chided and ridiculed with a display of humility it is a silent endorsement that the masses and all their lackluster effort are the standard and the efforts of the great are meant to be absorbed in the murky depths of social stagnation. There was always an unsaid truth between the person who makes fun of other people and those who allow it that states a lack of superiority in the target and if left unchecked the bar that we should all aspire to falls short. In my own personal life even as a very little kid people would tell me, especially adults, that you can’t go through life as if your shit doesn’t stink. You can’t go around acting like you are better than everyone else and expect to be a successful person, because they won’t let you into the gates of life if you don’t make peace with them. Well, I never listened and all those things they said were untrue. Reality states that if you are the best at things no matter what controversies are going on in your life, the world will beat a path to your door and line up to seek your attention, because they will need what you have to offer. So why would anybody who works harder than the average person ever give jokesters a seat at the table of equality by allowing puns to go unchecked.

People who want to elevate themselves by castigating the successful and harder working will call their targets “thin skinned” if they don’t silently endorse the efforts at equality by allowing it to continue. But why did it ever become necessary to “take a joke” especially if one doesn’t dish it out? I can tell you dear reader that the source of that trend comes from the same European concepts that invented Marxism and it never should have been allowed to set foot in American culture. Personally, I am a very positive person by nature. I think greatly of myself obviously and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I love myself and everything I do and I live every single day and every single second of that day trying to be the best that I can be. And when I deal with other people, I always look for the positives in them. I always try to extract out of them goodness and a positive self-image. People who fail to respond or persist to continue their lives as a joke and find jokes in others are really just too lazy to try to accomplish anything in life, so their attempts at jokes are meant to keep the bars of life low for everyone. I see this as detrimental to any productive culture and have never participated. I don’t let people make fun of me and I don’t make fun of them. If they do make fun of me, I will tear up whoever it is that is doing the banter because I see it as an attack not just on me as a person, but on what the efforts of goodness should stand for. Do I take myself seriously, yes? Of course! And for damn good reason. Everyone should, and I am happy to help them look in the mirror and like the person that looks back at them. But fault-finding is a very negative thing and has huge implications on the quality of any society, and I personally don’t allow it.

I have never thought it appropriate to have a White House Correspondence Dinner that centered around telling jokes and making fun of our own culture. People around the world watch the video clips and it doesn’t set a good standard for a country that leads the world to make. Why would anybody follow a culture that finds so much fault with itself? The answer is they wouldn’t. Yet that has always been the secret ambition of the jokesters, to keep others from following the great people of high ambition and taste, and to celebrate the weak losers of lazy aptitude. We are talking about the kind of society that celebrates the star football player in any school at the same level of the class clown to the point where the star plays right along to endorse the behavior because they think it’s the popular thing to do—and that if they don’t, they may lose their star status. That is the great ruse of our modern times, that jokesters are just as important as the stars that build the society.

I understand Trump’s reservations about the way the White House Correspondence Dinner has been conducted. After all it has the word “White House” in it so that is a brand that President Trump has a great interest in protecting. Why would he want to cheapen it with the jokes of the stupid and lazy, to lower its image on the world stage just so that he could appear “cool.” That’s what we say to people we want to lower their guard to us, “be cool.” Don’t get upset, just drop your standards and opinions and join us in the collective mud of civility where we are all equally bad, stupid and imperfect creatures of God. No thanks. I like striving for perfection every day and working as hard as I can to get there. The last thing I want to hear is some joke about my hair, or the way I talk, or other little nitpick. And Trump is of the same mind, and I don’t blame him for it one bit! One way to make America great again is to believe that its great to start with, and that requires looking at the greatness and celebrating it, not making fun of it and trying to demean it so that other people won’t feel the pressure to be better. They need to try to be better and not use jokes as a way to insulate themselves from the expectations of the ambitious.

Rich Hoffman

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